


Curious and Brave

by Psilent (HereThereBeFic)



Series: I hope our time and place match again soon [1]
Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Character Study, Friendship, Gen, Mentors, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-02
Updated: 2013-09-02
Packaged: 2017-12-25 09:53:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/951703
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HereThereBeFic/pseuds/Psilent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eighteen through, roughly, twenty-six, are what Dana privately thinks of as the Danger Years.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Curious and Brave

“ _Did he really drive you out to a **mountain**? A **real** mountain? What was it **like**?”_

“ _Mountains aren't real, Dana.”_

“ _But –”_

“ _The **construct** he showed us was vast, and silent, and looming. Vegetation crawled up its ever-increasing slope like long, winding snakes between the boulders and the dirt and the sand. It was terrifying, and inspiring, and terror-inspiring.”_

“ _Wow... I'd like to see one someday, I think.”_

“ _Mountains aren't **real** , Dana.”_

“ _I –”_

“ _Mountains. Aren't. Real. You want to see a **construct** someday, which is a perfectly **acceptable** and **safe** and **non-council-discouraged** thing to **do** or **want** to do.”_

“ _...I want to see a construct of a mountain someday, Cecil.”_

“ _I hope you get to.”_

_"I just wish I'd been in the office yesterday so I could have gone with, is all."_

_"So do I."_

-

Cecil wishes a lot of things.

He wishes Dana's mother would throw something at him. He wishes Dana's brother were a surly, angry teenager. He wishes he wasn't too much of a coward to stand tall and stoic and calm and let himself be easy to hate.

He rings the doorbell and hunches his shoulders and waves awkwardly at the resigned, tired woman who answers it and the small, wide-eyed boy hiding behind her legs.

Dana's mother's name is Opal. The day she was born, all children were required to be named at least in part for their Gregorian birthstones, on pain of a vaguely-worded curse involving frogs and hunger pains being brought down on their families for seven generations beginning with them. (Luckily, not many babies were born that day, and even fewer survived to adulthood, so mixups have always been a humorous distraction rather than any sort of _real_ nuisance.)

Cecil can remember making the announcement. Opal is older than him.

“We heard the broadcast, Cecil,” she says, and her voice is Dana's voice with laugh lines and calluses. “You didn't need to come over.”

Cecil ducks his head. He shrugs. He waves at the boy again, before he can stop himself.

“She asked me to tell you,” he says. His voice is slightly hoarse, slightly high, slightly not-his-Radio-Voice, and he's pleased about it. They deserve that much honesty. (The show has just ended, and it takes him a while to transition.)

“Go play,” Opal says to the boy, and he obediently retreats into the house. She steps out and shuts the door behind her, and Cecil is crawlingly relieved that she did not invite him in.

“What did she think you were saying to her?” she asks, leaning back against the door, arms crossed, eyes darting to meet his as he tries to avoid the contact.

He clears his throat. “I'm not sure. Some of her responses would suggest she was hearing the exact opposite of what I actually said, but – some of them... Well. You heard.”

“Yes.”

Yes.

She heard.

She heard her daughter's voice, for the first time in months, _concerned_ and determined and brave, and sincerely thanking the man who sent her to her fate.

Cecil swallows. “I'm sorry.”

“It's her _job_ ,” Opal says sharply. “It's the job she's always wanted.”

“I –”

Opal tilts her chin up and her eyes are bright and Cecil feels like he is shrinking. “Interns investigate. Interns take risks. Dana has _ached_ for those things since she was a little girl, so don't _insult_ her by acting like _you_ shouldn't have _made her_ do it. Don't pretend you could have _stopped_ her if you'd _tried._ ”

Oh.

He nods, tightly. “...You're right. Of course. Dana has... always been promising.”

“You mean dangerous.”

He tilts his head to one side. “I really can't say. I... really can't say.”

“...I know.” Opal sighs, and her imperial lean against the door becomes an exhausted slouch. “Don't think I don't appreciate you... showing her the ropes. I do. I do.”

Her eyes are far away – not in the literal sense, which happened to roughly a fourth of the population a few days ago but thankfully doesn't seem to be a recurring issue. “Curious and brave, Cecil,” she murmurs. “They're two of the most dangerous things to be, and my girl is both. She could never be anything but an intern, and that's more dangerous than the other two combined. Thank you.”

“...You're welcome.”

“Cecil.”

“Yes?”

She doesn't want to ask this question. He can see it in her clenched fists, and the muscle jumping in her jaw, and he can hear it in the breath she takes.

But she asks.

“Is there any guarantee... you weren't mishearing her – the same way she was mishearing you?”

“My phone plan covers temporally dissonant, spacially incongruous, and all-around cross-plane calls,” he assures her in a rush, glad, at least, to be able to give her this. “If she's on a different call plan, the transmission over to her side was probably a little... _bumpy_ , but it should have been fine coming through to me.”

Opal sags against the door like she's going to melt into it, though Cecil is sure she knows better than to attempt that without completing the traditional accompanying ritual first. She heaves a loud exhale and her shoulders sink just a little farther than they should, strictly speaking, be able to. “Good. Good. So she's safe. She thinks.”

“Yes.”

“She has _hope._ ”

“Yes.”

“Well.” Opal draws herself up, and smiles in a way that hurts to look at. “This day and age, what more can a parent ask for?”

-

“ _How long have you been studying journalism, Dana?”_

“ _Since fifth grade. They didn't introduce it in elementary school until I was going into third, and then the course selections were done by lottery and blindfolded apple bobbing for a couple years, so I had to wait.”_

“ _And you're – what year, now?”_

“ _Sophomore – college sophomore.”_

“ _Huh. Neat. We don't get too many of those. It's mostly been high schoolers, lately.”_

“ _Some of my older friends in high school joined the internship program as juniors. I wanted to wait until I had a little more – life experience.”_

“ _Oh?”_

“ _None of them came back.”_

-

Dana doesn't have many friends her own age. She isn't lacking in people skills, by any means – rather, Night Vale is lacking in people.

There are small children, spry and eager and learning already to be bloodthirsty but not yet how to curb it. There are teenagers, sulking and annoyed and too apathetic to take risks, or else jumpy and overzealous and flitting around like sandflies. There are too-tired, too-old thirty-somethings, with nervous smiles, and reflexes one would never compare to a cat's outside of a blatant attempt to shame the animal. And there are the middle-aged and the elderly, who shake their heads at the New Ways and play supernally alarming card games.

Dana attended kindergarten with twenty-eight other students, started ninth grade with twenty-four of those, and graduated with eleven. Two moved. The rest didn't.

Eighteen through, roughly, twenty-six, are what Dana privately thinks of as the Danger Years.

People get comfortable; they get cocky; they slow down; they stop listening and looking and ducking. Or they get tired; they stop caring; they leave the town or else let it consume them and they don't put up a fight.

Or – they put up several fights, tooth and nail and hammer and bat and megaphone; they scream their frustration to anyone who will listen and they scream as they disappear.

Dana is twenty and her working concept of the Danger Years is helpful to a point and then petrifying and oppressive. All she has are negative examples. Quit this. Avoid that. When it comes to What To Do, she has nothing to draw from.

Her mother tries. But times were _different_ when she was Dana's age, and anyway she seems to have repressed a lot of it, and most attempts at advice end in a frustrated and worried and entirely unhelpful, “Oh, _Dana_ , you've just got to be _sensible._ ”

Dana is twenty and she knows how to vote and how to drive. She knows which lights to look at and which sounds to ignore, sometimes, and she knows how to act like she knows things she doesn't know.

She knows to tune in to the community radio broadcast every night. She knows her best bet at making it to twenty-seven is to simply not die before that point, and she knows this must be possible because other people have done it.

Dana is twenty and she knows that she wants to help people. She knows that the best way to do this is to get them the information they need in order to survive. She knows that she has wanted to be a reporter since she was small enough that it feels like she has _always_ wanted it, and she knows that spending the amount of time it would take to work out exactly when and how and why that overlapped with the desire to help people would put her over her weekly allotment of introspection.

Dana is twenty and she knows her little brother, who runs in the street and can't aim his rifle properly yet and crawls into her bed when the noises outside become unfamiliar, has a better chance of seeing another birthday than she does.

Dana is twenty and she takes a deep breath and marches through the door of the radio station with her head up, and whispers her name into a quivering five-sheet application, and knows that she has made it this far.

-

“ _Dana! Glad I caught you. If you have a moment, I just wanted to talk to you about that field report you sent in.”_

“ _Oh – I, I know you didn't technically send me out there, and it was supposed to be my day off and everything, but I was **there** , so, I figured, I, I can, you don't have to –”_

“ _Oh, no, no **no** , you didn't do anything **wrong**! I'm sorry, I forgot how new you are, that was thoughtless of me.”_

“ _I... what?”_

“ _I just wanted to say it was an **excellent** report, Dana. Very detailed! Do you write much? In the figurative sense of recording information in a way that can be read by others, of course, and not the literal sense of putting illicit writing utensils to paper to do so.”_

“ _I – yes. Yes, I've always – written. In the figurative sense. I'm good with texting.”_

“ _You did this on a **phone**?”_

“ _Some of it. I – fixed it up, on a computer, later. I was a little busy with all the running and the uncontrollable yodeling while it was happening.”_

“ _Of course, of course. This is impressive stuff, Dana. You really nailed down the feel of the situation.”_

“ _I've... always thought details were important. They change so fast, and not all of them show up in pictures, or videos, or audio recordings. You can't really even trust your own memory. So you've got to put down all the details you can, and get them out to as many people as possible, and then maybe they'll – exist – a bit longer. Maybe long enough for someone to figure them out.”_

“ _Dana, I **couldn't** have said it better myself!”_

“ _Thank you, um – sir... ?”_

“ _Oh! No! No, no, I'm not actually your boss! Goodness, I don't know **why** you all think that. **Management** is **everyone's** boss. **My** job simply involves dictating a good chunk of **your** job. But we both answer to the same higher powers. I am but a mouthpiece.”_

“ _Oh. Well, then. Thank you, Cecil.”_

-

Everything around her is new and inexplicable, but everything around her has been new and inexplicable for months now, so it doesn't take much effort to pick and choose minutiae.

“It's a framed eight-by-seven,” she says into her phone, closing her eyes briefly to reference the image in her head. She is good at remembering. “Black and white photo – this _old_ _lighthouse._..”

She has never seen a real lighthouse, but not in the same way that she has never seen a real mountain. Lighthouses exist. Just not _here._

“It hangs crooked, just to the right of center on one wall,” she says calmly, and remembers squinting. “The lighthouse in the photo looks to be in the middle of a field. There's no water. Why would there be a lighthouse, not near the water?”

Cecil's answer doesn't make sense, but she isn't overly bothered by this. It's nice, just to hear a friendly voice. And to be more or less confident that she knows who it's coming from.

In the back of her mind, she knows she should be afraid. But she isn't, not really. Concerned, maybe. Panicked, briefly. But not _afraid_ , not in any continuous way. She has a job to do and she's doing it. She's reporting.

The word _comfortable_ springs up, followed by the words _cocky_ and _don't_.

 _I've made it this far_ , she thinks at herself.

But she looks over her shoulder before moving on.

She is twenty, and she is a reporter on the case, and soon, wherever she is, she will see twenty-one.


End file.
